Nutrition
by Forever-Furuba
Summary: Jim's been half-troll for a while now, and Blinky is getting concerned about his diet.


Blinky shook his head and took a handful of utensils away from Jim, replacing the cutlery with three socks and a dead squirrel.

"Hey!"

"I'm happy to see you eating your minerals, Jim, but you need protein as well."

The half-troll moved his food away from what Blinky had just given him.

"I don't want to eat socks," he complained. "Or raw meat."

"The squirrel is roasted," Blinky promised. He'd noticed Jim's aversion to uncooked meat on the journey to New Jersey.

Cooking wasn't as … omni-present in troll cuisine as it was among humans, but now that New Trollmarket was a bit more constructed, Klimp had been happy to prepare something for the Trollhunter at her new restaurant. (Blinky would have cooked the squirrel for Jim himself if he could trust the other trolls to go twenty minutes without having a crisis requiring their Elder's intervention, but he hadn't wanted to take that risk.)

"It's still got fur on it," said Jim, eyeing the squirrel mistrustfully.

Blinky sighed and rubbed Jim's shoulder. "There are proteins in animal hair that differ from the proteins in the meat. A young troll will not thrive on metals alone." And Jim hadn't even been getting enough of _that_ until recently. On the road, he'd mostly been living off discarded plastics he found.

Jim made a grumpy noise. Still, after he finished the spoon in his hand, he picked up the squirrel.

Blinky said nothing when Jim wrapped it in foil – he'd asked around, and of course done some reading, and including elements that were familiar increased the odds of success when introducing a new food to a fussy eater. (As long as they knew it was a new food, and weren't being caught off-guard because they thought it was something they already liked and then found out as they were biting into it that something was 'wrong'.)

He really should've started some lessons on basic troll nutrition as soon as the boy had been transformed (well, once the battle was taken care of), but Blinky had let it slide during the trip across country. It was hard to find _enough_ food for a caravan of trolls, and never mind how healthy any of it was.

In that period of scarcity and distraction, Blinky had allowed Jim to form bad habits, letting the part-human keep his squeamishness about eating whole animals, when trolls needed the fur and bones just as much as the muscle and organs. He had to correct that now.

Jim raised the makeshift burrito to his mouth, lips pulled back in a grimace – and finally closed his eyes and took a bite.

Blinky rubbed Jim's shoulder again as the boy chewed and swallowed.

"_Blugh_," said Jim. "It didn't taste as bad as I thought it would, but the _texture_ was _awful_."

"Perhaps a sock would be more palatable," Blinky hinted. Jim shook his head and gulped down some water.

"It's the fuzziness that bugs me. Socks would be _worse_."

"Jim." Blinky caught himself, and tried to make his tone gentler, less scolding. "You cannot restrict your diet only to 'what tastes good'. You need to eat what's good _for _you."

"Strickler doesn't eat socks," Jim pointed out.

"Strickler is not a paragon of good decision-making skills," Blinky countered. Jim smiled a little. His ears twitched when he did that now.

Jim haltingly ate his squirrel burrito. "I miss cooking," he said. "I know I can learn again, but, it's not going to be the same."

There were a few things Blinky could say to that. This sort of conversation had happened several times since Jim's transformation. Jim was already skipping ahead (and taking Blinky's lines) by acknowledging he could relearn a skill as a troll that he'd had as a human and which his trollish traits made … different now. Blinky's next line (or Claire's; or Barbara's, Toby's, AAARRRGGHH's, or Strickler's, if it came up in a phone call or video chat) was that, even if it wasn't the _same_, it could still be_ good_.

Blinky imagined Jim was probably getting tired of hearing that. So, instead, Blinky simply agreed, "No, it won't."

There was a brief pause, and then Jim said, "I started watching the cooking channel when I was six, did you know that?"

Blinky shook his head.

"I found it by accident. I was looking for cartoons. There was this chef, dicing – I think eggplant, something purple – and I'd never seen purple food before, so I kept watching. I didn't really, you know, _get it_, back then, but … Mom was busy a lot, and it was nice to have background noise when I wasn't at Toby's. And when I got a little older, I started trying things, and …"

Jim talked Blinky through some of his early cooking adventures and misadventures. He finished off his cutlery while talking and didn't notice when he absentmindedly ate the socks as well.

Blinky did notice. It was why he hadn't chided Jim for speaking with his mouth full. Nutrition came first. Etiquette could wait for another night.

* * *

_Even writing in Blinky's perspective, I couldn't work this into the narration without it feeling clunky, but basically Blinky is thinking to himself that when Jim complains about cooking not being the same anymore, Jim doesn't want _reassurance_ ("but it can still be good"), he wants _sympathy_ ("yes, that is true and I can tell it bothers you.") Blinky was right, which is why Jim relaxes enough to start reminiscing._

_Written for Misza07 in a TOA Secret Santa gift exchange on tumblr._


End file.
